I'm curious as to people's thoughts here. I'm not posting this to demean or discredit the M14, I'm just legitimately surprised by the result. I honestly expected more from the M1A.

__________________"The gun has played a critical role in history. An invention which has been praised and denounced... served hero and villain alike... and carries with it moral responsibility. To understand the gun is to better understand history."

“What is morality in any given time or place? It is what the majority then and there happen to like, and immorality is what they dislike.” - Alfred North Whitehead

I have a feeling that rail over the action of the M1A wasn't helping much.

Then again, this is why during WW2 they issued soldiers with gigantic condoms to put over their rifles to protect them from this kind of thing, leading to that almost-certainly-untrue story about Winston Churchill ordering for them to be labelled "medium" to frighten the Germans.

On another note: I think it’s easy for Americans to deify the primary service weapon of wars that we won, and hold corresponding negative views of service rifles used in wars we lost. This is why the M1 is held in such high regard, while the early M16s (used in Vietnam) are derided as garbage, for instance. I think there’s a weird psychological tendency to associate outcomes of wars with the quality of the main weapons used by the grunts in those wars.

On another note: I think it’s easy for Americans to deify the primary service weapon of wars that we won, and hold corresponding negative views of service rifles used in wars we lost. This is why the M1 is held in such high regard, while the early M16s (used in Vietnam) are derided as garbage, for instance. I think there’s a weird psychological tendency to associate outcomes of wars with the quality of the main weapons used by the grunts in those wars.

Naw, that doesn't work because there's documentation of people deriding the early M16s as garbage during the Vietnam War, so unless they could see the future there can't be that kind of connection.

Naw, that doesn't work because there's documentation of people deriding the early M16s as garbage during the Vietnam War, so unless they could see the future there can't be that kind of connection.

Oh, I recognize that (I know that the nickname “Mattel toy rifle” originated during, not after, the war), but it often seems as though the negative post-war reputation for those early M16s was disproportionate relative to the scope of the problems and the length of time it took to resolve them. Even amongst people who never served in Vietnam.

Oh, I recognize that (I know that the nickname “Mattel toy rifle” originated during, not after, the war), but it often seems as though the negative post-war reputation for those early M16s was disproportionate relative to the scope of the problems and the length of time it took to resolve them. Even amongst people who never served in Vietnam.

It's more likely to be because of the same switch in how information was reported to the people back home that caused the extremely negative reception of the war itself, I'd imagine.

Mind you, apparently the North Vietnamese thought the AK was a piece of junk and wished they could get those high-tech Yankee rifles instead.